SPEAKER_00: You're listening to the road.
SPEAKER_00: After teachers, Steve Holmes.
SPEAKER_01: The more you focus on the beautiful and the positive and the goodness and the grace and the healing and the supernatural love of God, the more your faith grows, and the more you get out of the fear narrative.
SPEAKER_01: But some of you, your identity is a little too much in fear.
SPEAKER_01: That's who you are.
SPEAKER_01: And I'm gonna challenge you that it's gonna take some work, it's gonna take some work for you to say to yourself, I'm not gonna camp there anymore, even though my circumstances don't care.
SPEAKER_00: At the road, our vision is to raise up wholehearted disciples of Jesus Christ.
SPEAKER_00: For more information on the road, visit theroad.org.
SPEAKER_00: We hope you are encouraged by today's message from Pastor Teacher Steve Holt.
SPEAKER_01: God is moving mountains in many of your lives.
SPEAKER_01: God is doing things that you never expected.
SPEAKER_01: If he's not, I want to challenge you today that that is what God does.
SPEAKER_01: And it's probably the most beautiful definition of God is that he moves mountains and that and that he does the unexpected in our life.
SPEAKER_01: He's a miracle-working God, but he's working with your mind, church.
SPEAKER_01: He's working with our mind, church.
SPEAKER_01: Do you realize that we have 80,000 thoughts a day, and 90% of them are exactly the same as the day before?
SPEAKER_01: Because you have these ruts in your mind, you have these ruts that run through in your mind and your frontal cortex, and they don't change.
SPEAKER_01: And it takes effort on your part to renew your mind, to change your thinking.
SPEAKER_01: And sometimes we're missing the miraculous, we're missing the supernatural work of God because we've become so accustomed with the natural.
SPEAKER_01: And church to us is just religion, it's not a dynamic encounter with the living, supernatural, miracle-working, healing God.
SPEAKER_01: And so you have to change your thinking.
SPEAKER_01: So today I want to talk about the beauty of God again.
SPEAKER_01: Because I'm captivated by the beauty of God.
SPEAKER_01: You can be captivated by the beauty of God, and one of the most powerful things we can do in our lives to get out of our thinking rut is to begin to meditate on, think about, study, and worship the beauty of God.
SPEAKER_01: It's all around us.
SPEAKER_01: So your feelings, your feelings, how you feel, are the emotions of your body.
SPEAKER_01: But how you think are the emotions of your brain.
SPEAKER_01: So if you want your emotions to change, usually you have something that you do that makes you emotionally happy.
SPEAKER_01: If you want the emotions of your mind to change, you've got to renew your mind.
SPEAKER_01: You've got to think differently.
SPEAKER_01: I had an encounter with the beauty of God as a freshman in college.
SPEAKER_01: So I'd gotten saved, I'd come to know the Lord, I was sharing my faith, I was in a Bible study, I was growing.
SPEAKER_01: And one day I was walking from my dorm to biology class, and I know exactly where it was on the University of Georgia campus when something came over me, it was the Holy Spirit.
SPEAKER_01: I would call it something back then, I would call it the Holy Spirit today.
SPEAKER_01: Holy Spirit came upon me, and I had a baptism of the beauty of God.
SPEAKER_01: You've heard about the baptism of the Holy Spirit.
SPEAKER_01: You've heard about water baptism.
SPEAKER_01: This was a baptism into the beauty of God, and I looked around and I just started weeping.
SPEAKER_01: Seriously, I must have really looked like I was an idiot and that I was losing my mind.
SPEAKER_01: But I remember going up to a tulip poplar tree.
SPEAKER_01: Some of you may know what a tulip poplar is, but tulip poplar is very popular.
SPEAKER_01: My grandmother loved tulip poplars, my mom loved tulips, I know it's tulip poplar.
SPEAKER_01: So I remember going up and just going, wow, look at this leaf.
SPEAKER_01: Fortunately, no one that I knew was around me.
SPEAKER_01: How many have seen Amazing Grace?
SPEAKER_01: The story of William Wilberforce.
SPEAKER_01: Remember that part?
SPEAKER_01: I just love that part where he's out in the field and his servant comes out and he thinks he's losing his mind, and he's just, he's just entranced by a spider web, I think.
SPEAKER_01: And it's just that's what it was like for me.
SPEAKER_01: And it lasted for about 10 minutes, and then it was gone.
SPEAKER_01: It lifted.
SPEAKER_01: But it was a baptism into the beauty of God.
SPEAKER_01: And I don't know if it began then or later, but there was a there was a new awareness of God's art gallery after that.
SPEAKER_01: There was a new awareness of God's art gallery.
SPEAKER_01: You know what God's art gallery is?
SPEAKER_01: It's creation.
SPEAKER_01: And you guys know we went to Japan and we went to Japan.
SPEAKER_01: I used to, this sounds almost like something kind of, I don't know, heretical to say, but I used to love to go to Buddhist temples.
SPEAKER_01: I'm a Christian missionary, but I used to love to go to Buddhist temples to spend time with the Lord.
SPEAKER_01: I know that sounds weird.
SPEAKER_01: Is the presence of God around Buddhist temples?
SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
SPEAKER_01: But the presence of God was around bamboo forest.
SPEAKER_01: And I still love bamboo forests wherever I can find them.
SPEAKER_01: You don't find them very often in Colorado, let me tell you that right now.
SPEAKER_01: But I would go into these bamboo forests that I think the monks may have planted.
SPEAKER_01: I don't know, but they were always around Buddhist temples and stuff.
SPEAKER_01: And I would get in there, and here's all these bamboo, and you get in and you couldn't see anything, and I would just get in there.
SPEAKER_01: Because remember, I'm living in the second largest city in the world at that time in Tokyo.
SPEAKER_01: There was no escaping people, they were everywhere.
SPEAKER_01: And I would just go in there and I'd get into that bamboo forest and just and just spend time with the Lord.
SPEAKER_01: And the intimacy that I felt and the closeness with him through his word and through worship.
SPEAKER_01: And back then I had a hymnal.
SPEAKER_01: I still have that hymnal.
SPEAKER_01: It's a little red hymnal, and I'd sing worship songs.
SPEAKER_01: So I don't know if there's ever any monks in Tokyo that say, man, there's some there's some sounds coming out of our bamboo forest that sound very foreign to me.
SPEAKER_01: And I guess for them it'd be like someone was speaking in tongues.
SPEAKER_01: Because it was in English.
SPEAKER_01: And then being on a river, fly fishing, and the steam coming off the river and the mountains in the background, or a deer crossing over.
SPEAKER_01: Beauty's all around us.
SPEAKER_01: This this beauty narrative that we have to begin to experience.
SPEAKER_01: Saint Augustine, I came across this prayer of Saint Augustine.
SPEAKER_01: Listen to what he says in the fourth century.
SPEAKER_01: He is beautiful in heaven and beautiful on earth and beautiful in the womb and beautiful in his parents' arms, beautiful in his miracles, beautiful in inviting us to life, beautiful in not worrying about death, beautiful in giving us his life, and beautiful in taking it up again.
SPEAKER_01: He is beautiful on the cross, beautiful in the tomb, and beautiful in heaven.
SPEAKER_01: Beauty has a name.
SPEAKER_01: His name is Jesus.
SPEAKER_01: One of the most beautiful things that we do at this church is we take the Lord's Supper together.
SPEAKER_01: And we're not very good in the Protestant Church at explaining the beauty of the Eucharist or communion.
SPEAKER_01: The Orthodox Church does it better in many ways, and so does the Catholic Church.
SPEAKER_01: I think the Lutheran Church that I came out of does it very well too.
SPEAKER_01: But the beauty of the table is that what we're doing, guys, is we're celebrating the life, death, and resurrection of Christ.
SPEAKER_01: You're taking the body.
SPEAKER_01: And I'm not, I don't believe in transubstantiation, where the body literally of Jesus becomes the bread, or the blood of Jesus literally becomes the juice.
SPEAKER_01: But I do believe in what we call consubstantiation, and that's the idea that the presence of God is mysteriously there.
SPEAKER_01: 1 Corinthians 11 seems to indicate that those who take the Eucharist wrongly, some have even died.
SPEAKER_01: That's how holy and how beautiful it is to God that we take this.
SPEAKER_01: That's why we do it every week.
SPEAKER_01: So the beauty of the Eucharist, the beauty of our building.
SPEAKER_01: The building here matters to God.
SPEAKER_01: It really does.
SPEAKER_01: The beauty of this stage and the way Michael and his team have artistically crafted it and rounded it off was a picture we talked, we talked for hours about how we can make the sanctuary of God beautiful.
SPEAKER_01: That when people come in, there's no distractions.
SPEAKER_01: That we could that we could alleviate as many distractions as possible so that we at the road at Chapel Hills can come into the beauty, experience the beauty, and love the beauty that has a name.
SPEAKER_01: Jesus Christ.
SPEAKER_01: My wife and many others worked so hard on the lobby to put up all those all those pictures in the lobby are photos taken by a gal in our church.
SPEAKER_01: We didn't like take those off some image off the internet.
SPEAKER_01: Those are pictures we took that someone in our church took.
SPEAKER_01: Because we wanted it to be beautiful to all of us as you come in, you'd feel the beauty.
SPEAKER_01: You'd experience the beauty that would set your heart as you come through the lobby for a beautiful worship time.
SPEAKER_01: And the beauty of donuts.
SPEAKER_01: Amen.
SPEAKER_01: Says this.
SPEAKER_01: I love this.
SPEAKER_01: Within the beautiful, the whole person quivers.
SPEAKER_01: Now that's the way I felt when I first saw Liz, but I'm not going to elaborate on that.
SPEAKER_01: When you see beauty, when you experience beauty, even your emotions are touched.
SPEAKER_01: So turn in your Bibles to Psalm 27 because David is trying to challenge us to an understanding of the importance of beauty.
SPEAKER_01: Beauty is a powerful pointer to truth.
SPEAKER_01: The hard sciences are discovering this.
SPEAKER_01: In the news story of science, Robert Ogros and George Stansou develop the growing conviction that in the sciences, and perhaps most of all in physics, beauty is considered.
SPEAKER_01: Now listen to this, this is really fascinating.
SPEAKER_01: Beauty is considered the most powerful pointer to truth in a theory, even more important than the experiment that they're going to do.
SPEAKER_01: They're finding that the elegance of an equation is often better evidence of its truth than the experiment itself.
SPEAKER_01: They write, quote, all of the most eminent physicists of the 20th century agree that beauty is the primary standard for scientific truth.
SPEAKER_01: Richard Feeman, Nobel Prize winner, writes, You can recognize truth by its beauty and its simplicity.
SPEAKER_01: In Thomas Dubay's book, The Evidential Power of Beauty, he has a whole chapter on how you define beauty.
SPEAKER_01: And one of the definitions is about six, but one of the definitions is simplicity.
SPEAKER_01: And what they're finding in physics, what they're finding in microbiology, and what they're finding in mathematics is the simpler the equation, the simpler the solution, the more beautiful the solution, the simplicity of it all points to the fact that that's true.
SPEAKER_01: It's pointing them to truth.
SPEAKER_01: Men and women, there is a revival happening in the hard sciences right now.
SPEAKER_01: They do not know what to do.
SPEAKER_01: Some of these guys are atheists.
SPEAKER_01: I love this quote.
SPEAKER_01: I think I've got it here.
SPEAKER_01: This is great.
SPEAKER_01: Where'd I put that quote?
SPEAKER_01: About atheist.
SPEAKER_01: G.K.
SPEAKER_01: Chesterton said this how frustrating it must be for the atheist to be struck with the beauty of reality and have no one to thank for it.
SPEAKER_01: Isn't that great?
SPEAKER_01: I love that.
SPEAKER_01: But what they're finding, church, is that as they study mathematics, let's just take, for example, the butterfly.
SPEAKER_01: As they study the butterfly, it's actually a mathematical formula that fascinates mathematicians with the way in which the wings move on a butterfly and how perfect they are, and it always, they say, points to truth.
SPEAKER_01: God has set it up that way.
SPEAKER_01: He's evangelizing physicists through butterflies, he's evangelizing mathematicians through math.
SPEAKER_01: How many hate math?
SPEAKER_01: How many love math?
SPEAKER_01: More hands went up.
SPEAKER_01: You're in the right church.
SPEAKER_01: Because math speaks of truth, and truth speaks of God, the creator of truth.
SPEAKER_01: And it's happening.
SPEAKER_01: They do not know what to do with Darwinism.
SPEAKER_01: They don't know what to do.
SPEAKER_01: Because chance theory is dying on the vine, left and right, and these guys are freaking out because it keeps pointing to a creator God, and there's not supposed to be a creator God, and God and science aren't supposed to be mixed together, and yet all of science is pointing to the creator of science, God.
SPEAKER_01: And it's a revival happening, folks.
SPEAKER_01: They don't know what to do, they don't know what to do.
SPEAKER_01: Watching Amazing Grace last week on the life of William Wilberforce again for the umpteenth time.
SPEAKER_01: My kids reminded me of that.
SPEAKER_01: And I said, we've got to watch it because this is what a revolution looks like.
SPEAKER_01: This is what reformation looks like.
SPEAKER_01: We talk a lot about revival around here, and I believe revival is actually upon us, gang.
SPEAKER_01: There's too many things happening right now around us, with people coming to Christ and people having their bodies touched, people getting set free from the demonic.
SPEAKER_01: The stuff is happening left and right.
SPEAKER_01: I don't share most of it because I wouldn't get to my sermon.
SPEAKER_01: But so much is happening.
SPEAKER_01: It's if the Spirit of God, the presence of God is coming down, it's around us, it's happening among us, but there's got to be another step.
SPEAKER_01: And that other step is reformation.
SPEAKER_01: Reformation of society, reformation of the arts, reformation of media, reformation of business.
SPEAKER_01: We need young, powerful, entrepreneurial missionaries that are starting businesses for the purpose of making money for the kingdom of God.
SPEAKER_01: And this reformation is happening before us right now, and God's raising up this church to be a part of that.
SPEAKER_01: With Outlier University, with the way we do our classes and the stuff that we're doing in prayer, all of that's part of that.
SPEAKER_01: So I wanted to see the William Wilberforce movie again.
SPEAKER_01: I want to see it.
SPEAKER_01: If you haven't seen it, you've got to see it.
SPEAKER_01: Just$2.99.
SPEAKER_01: You can rent it, run it through your computer, into your TV, you can watch it.
SPEAKER_01: And here's what I love about Wilberforce is that when he got saved, I mean really saved, he was one of the most up, he was a star.
SPEAKER_01: He was a star in parliament in Great Britain at that time, and he was probably third or fourth in line to be prime minister.
SPEAKER_01: But God put in his heart two great pursuits.
SPEAKER_01: The first pursuit was to kill and end the slave trade.
SPEAKER_01: The second pursuit was what he called in his book the reformation of manners.
SPEAKER_01: He called it the reformation of manners.
SPEAKER_01: Well, here's what he meant.
SPEAKER_01: He meant the reformation of morals.
SPEAKER_01: He wanted to see all of society in Great Britain become Christian and start acting Christian.
SPEAKER_01: He wanted to see the kingdom of God, the reign and the rule of Christ, over issues in government, child welfare, labor laws, unions.
SPEAKER_01: He wanted God to show up with revival power and his presence in those areas.
SPEAKER_01: Men and women, should we think anything less?
SPEAKER_01: God has raised up the church to be the fullness of Christ, Ephesians 1 tells us.
SPEAKER_01: Excuse me, Ephesians 2.
SPEAKER_01: This fullness of Christ flowing through us.
SPEAKER_01: So turn to Psalm 27.
SPEAKER_01: I am gonna get there, I promise.
SPEAKER_01: But the reason I love Psalm 27 is not just because of this one thing that David speaks of here and the beauty of God, but because I like the whole narrative of what he's in when he makes this proclamation because he's actually inside a fear narrative.
SPEAKER_01: And I think the greatest strategy of Satan in our lives is to keep you and I in fear.
SPEAKER_01: Fear over our finances, fear about the future, fear about our health, fear about germs, fear about whatever.
SPEAKER_01: Phobias.
SPEAKER_01: Satan's great strategy is to make you phobic over everything.
SPEAKER_01: You never take risk.
SPEAKER_01: You never walk out by faith because you're so engulfed in fear.
SPEAKER_01: And so, David, man, if anybody knew fear and understood the battle with fear, it would be David.
SPEAKER_01: So look at verse one.
SPEAKER_01: He says, The Lord is my light and my salvation, whom shall I fear?
SPEAKER_01: So there's something he's asking himself, whom shall I fear?
SPEAKER_01: Is fear.
SPEAKER_01: The Lord is the strength of my life, of whom shall I be afraid?
SPEAKER_01: Of whom shall I be afraid?
SPEAKER_01: When the wicked come against me to eat up my flesh, my enemies and foes, they stumbled and fell.
SPEAKER_01: He is surrounded by enemies.
SPEAKER_01: He's surrounded by a fear narrative.
SPEAKER_01: The news wants you to live and camp out in a fear narrative.
SPEAKER_01: Be careful with watching too much news.
SPEAKER_01: Now I'm speaking to the mirror.
SPEAKER_01: I know everything that's going on.
SPEAKER_01: I can guarantee you I do.
SPEAKER_01: And if I take a day or two off, it is an absolute supernatural miracle.
SPEAKER_01: So I'm saying it to myself.
SPEAKER_01: But I'm finding that the less I watch the news, I mean, you need to be aware of things, because especially if we're going to be Reformation Christians who make a difference, we need to know what's going on, but we don't need to know too much of what's going on.
SPEAKER_01: Have you noticed it changes every day?
SPEAKER_01: And so as soon as you are all worried and frustrated from driving to work and you cut that guy off at the light and stuff, because you're like, eh, I can't believe those, those, I won't name any parties.
SPEAKER_01: Do that, you know?
SPEAKER_01: And then the next time you're, you know, the next day it's all been solved.
SPEAKER_01: And then it's a whole nother problem.
SPEAKER_01: Because 24-hour news needs you to watch them, to get their ratings, to get their money, to get their advertisements, so they they camp in a fear narrative, so you'll keep watching them.
SPEAKER_01: And some of you camp out in a fear narrative most of the time in your life.
SPEAKER_01: And you've got to break that.
SPEAKER_01: You've got these channels of your brain, of your 80,000 thoughts, that like 65% of them are fearful about stuff.
SPEAKER_01: So we've got to renew our minds, and that's what David does.
SPEAKER_01: Look at verse 3.
SPEAKER_01: Though an army may encamp against me, encamp.
SPEAKER_01: I like that.
SPEAKER_01: They're camping out around him.
SPEAKER_01: He feels like these enemies are all camping out around him.
SPEAKER_01: Anyone know what that's like?
SPEAKER_01: Where you just feel like, I mean, everything you fear is camped out right outside your door.
SPEAKER_01: My heart shall not fear, he says.
SPEAKER_01: Though war rise up against me.
SPEAKER_01: In this I'll be confident.
SPEAKER_01: He has to refocus his mind from a fear narrative to what's now going to become a beauty narrative.
SPEAKER_01: He's going to go from a fear narrative to a beauty narrative.
SPEAKER_01: And listen to this here's what I believe I believe the more you focus on beauty.
SPEAKER_01: The more faith you have.
SPEAKER_01: Now that may be a radical statement, but I believe it's true that the more you focus on the beautiful and the positive and the goodness and the grace and the healing and the supernatural love of God, the more your faith grows and the more you get out of a fear narrative.
SPEAKER_01: But some of you, your identity is built too much in fear.
SPEAKER_01: That's who you are.
SPEAKER_01: You're beholding fear so much that it's become you.
SPEAKER_01: And I'm going to challenge you that it's going to take some work.
SPEAKER_01: It's going to take some work for you to say to yourself, I'm not going to camp there anymore, even though my circumstances don't change.
SPEAKER_01: I don't think here any circumstances have changed in Psalm 27 between verse 1 and verse 3.
SPEAKER_01: He's saying his enemies have encamped around him.
SPEAKER_01: He's saying that war has encamped around him.
SPEAKER_01: But he's renewing his mind.
SPEAKER_01: You know what David's doing?
SPEAKER_01: He's preaching to himself.
SPEAKER_01: You ever preached yourself?
SPEAKER_01: George, you ever preached yourself?
SPEAKER_01: Lee, you ever preached yourself?
SPEAKER_01: What you do is you say, self.
SPEAKER_01: Shut up.
SPEAKER_01: Self?
SPEAKER_01: I'm not gonna camp out in that campground anymore.
SPEAKER_01: The KOA fear campground.
SPEAKER_01: I'm not setting up my camp, I'm not gonna set up my tent there anymore.
SPEAKER_01: I'm moving the trailer.
SPEAKER_01: You guys know about that because you got a trailer.
SPEAKER_01: You got a big old RV.
SPEAKER_01: I'm getting the RV out of the KOA fear campground, and I'm headed to the beauty campground.
SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna start thinking about beauty.
SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna I'm gonna meditate in beauty.
SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna love God's word.
SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna believe that the best days are yet in my future.
SPEAKER_01: And whatever mistakes I've made in the past, how many things I've messed up, or how many people I've hurt, or how many things I've done wrong, I'm gonna change that.
SPEAKER_01: I'm not gonna go there anymore.
SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna quit thinking about that.
SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna move out of that, and I've got a great future.
SPEAKER_01: And that future's in God and in his goodness and his power, and he's gonna have more of me than he had before.
SPEAKER_01: How many realize you don't need more of God?
SPEAKER_01: He needs more of you.
SPEAKER_01: More of God's here.
SPEAKER_01: He's as much here as he was at Pentecost in the book of Acts.
SPEAKER_01: He's as much here.
SPEAKER_01: He is his presence is here.
SPEAKER_01: What he needs is people who want his presence in their life, and you start getting enough of a group of people that are having that revival in their heart, and you will have reformation and you will have a revolution.
SPEAKER_01: Wilberforce built a revolution that changed Great Britain and then changed America.
SPEAKER_01: I've read the histories of the time, and they say that at the turn of the century, between the eighth and the 19th century and 20th century, every kid in all the schools in America knew who Wilberforce was.
SPEAKER_01: Nobody here talks about him now.
SPEAKER_01: We hear about racism every day.
SPEAKER_01: We hear about racism.
SPEAKER_01: But the greatest man who broke one of the most powerful tools of Satan to create racism in our society is forgotten because he was a Christian.
SPEAKER_01: But you know it.
SPEAKER_01: Study it.
SPEAKER_01: Study great men of God.
SPEAKER_01: Study men who've changed society.
SPEAKER_01: Study men who've evangelized nations.
SPEAKER_01: Study their lives.
SPEAKER_01: Read biographies.
SPEAKER_01: Read about them.
SPEAKER_01: Build up your faith and go, I want to be like that.
SPEAKER_01: I want to be like that.
SPEAKER_01: God use me in business.
SPEAKER_01: God use me in the arts.
SPEAKER_01: God use me in education.
SPEAKER_01: God use me in the government.
SPEAKER_01: God, I want to be used by you with a beauty narrative.
SPEAKER_01: So that's where David goes.
SPEAKER_01: Look at verse 4.
SPEAKER_01: One thing I have desired of the Lord that I will seek, that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord, and to inquire in his temple.
SPEAKER_01: For in the time of trouble, he shall hide me in his pavilion.
SPEAKER_01: In the secret place of his tabernacle, he shall hide me.
SPEAKER_01: He shall set me high upon a rock, and now my head shall be lifted up above my enemies, all around me.
SPEAKER_01: So they're still around him.
SPEAKER_01: His circumstances haven't changed.
SPEAKER_01: Therefore, I will offer sacrifices of joy in his tabernacle.
SPEAKER_01: I will sing as I will sing praises to the Lord.
SPEAKER_01: This is a beauty narrative.
SPEAKER_01: He's camping out in a beauty narrative.
SPEAKER_01: He's leaving the fear narrative.
SPEAKER_01: He's focusing his mind.
SPEAKER_01: He's refocusing his thinking.
SPEAKER_01: The thoughts, the emotions of his brain are cutting new channels in his frontal cortex.
SPEAKER_01: And he's deciding I'm going after beauty.
SPEAKER_01: And then what happens is God raises him up above his problems.
SPEAKER_01: God raises him up above his enemies.
SPEAKER_01: God raises him up.
SPEAKER_01: God gives him solutions.
SPEAKER_01: He starts knowing things he shouldn't know.
SPEAKER_01: That's why I believe reformation in all of these different eras and spheres of society, whether it be business, whether it be the arts, whether it be media, whether it be government, education, family, marriage, it should be, it's going to be believers.
SPEAKER_01: It's believers that are going to do it because we're going to hear from the Holy Spirit.
SPEAKER_01: You're going to have beauty flowing through your veins, and you're going to have solutions that nobody else has.
SPEAKER_01: Our greatest scientists are the youngsters right now coming up who are hearing this message, and they're going to go into the hard sciences, and they're going to go into sociology, and they're going to go into these other areas and disciplines, and they're going to bring the beauty of God there because God's already there.
SPEAKER_01: God's already there.
SPEAKER_01: He just needs some people to discover him there.
SPEAKER_01: He's already at your work.
SPEAKER_01: But as you begin to refocus your mind into the beauty of God and say, God, I want to see your beauty.
SPEAKER_01: I want to experience your beauty in my life.
SPEAKER_01: He will start to bring a revolution in your thinking and a revival in your heart.
SPEAKER_01: A revolution in your thinking and a revival in your heart.
SPEAKER_01: Look at verses 13 and 14, where he kind of gives us a result of this new mindset.
SPEAKER_01: I would have lost heart unless I had believed that I would see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.
SPEAKER_01: Wait on the Lord.
SPEAKER_01: Be of good courage, and he shall strengthen your heart.
SPEAKER_01: Wait, I say, wait on the Lord.
SPEAKER_01: Beauty has a name.
SPEAKER_01: David discovered that that beauty was in goodness.
SPEAKER_01: The goodness of the Lord and the land of the living.
SPEAKER_01: You know why he said that?
SPEAKER_01: Because he didn't want anyone who would read this poem to think he's talking about the land of the dying.
SPEAKER_01: Because we all believe, as Jesus followers, that it's going to be good in heaven.
SPEAKER_01: It's going to be better in heaven.
SPEAKER_01: Some of us are a little more closer to that than others.
SPEAKER_01: So we think more about it.
SPEAKER_01: But he's saying it's in the land of the living.
SPEAKER_01: Right now, he wants us to experience the goodness of the Lord.
SPEAKER_01: Right now, he wants us to experience the beauty of his goodness.
SPEAKER_01: So we have a choice.
SPEAKER_01: Fear or faith, man or God, circumstances or outcomes, problems or solutions.
SPEAKER_01: Second Corinthians 3, Paul says this.
SPEAKER_01: But we all with unveiled faces, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, comma, just as by the Spirit of God.
SPEAKER_01: So David is beholding the glory of God, and he's becoming the glory of God.
SPEAKER_01: You see, the beauty of God in Scripture is defined as glory, the glory of God.
SPEAKER_01: So when we behold the beauty of God, we're beholding the glory of God, and as we behold the glory of God, we become the glory of God.
SPEAKER_01: Become like what you behold.
SPEAKER_01: So I want to do just challenge you on three things here, three things to study, three things to consider.
SPEAKER_01: Number one, the glory supreme.
SPEAKER_01: The glory supreme, which is God's beauty.
SPEAKER_01: Study the gospel story.
SPEAKER_01: Like read through Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John again and meditate on the red.
SPEAKER_01: Meditate on the red and read the black.
SPEAKER_01: Look at the black and meditate on the red, if you have one of those kind of Bibles.
SPEAKER_01: But meditate on the words of God and say, God, reveal your beauty through this story.
SPEAKER_01: Meditate on the gospel story.
SPEAKER_01: Meditate on what Christ did through his life, death, and resurrection.
SPEAKER_01: Secondly, crown of the cosmos.
SPEAKER_01: Jot that down.
SPEAKER_01: Study the crown of the cosmos.
SPEAKER_01: The crown of the cosmos are people.
SPEAKER_01: Study people, great men of God, with great characters, with great virtue, that did great things.
SPEAKER_01: Study them.
SPEAKER_01: Dubay calls them the crown of the cosmos.
SPEAKER_01: We are the highest of all creation.
SPEAKER_01: Camels and horses and elephants don't build buildings.
SPEAKER_01: Bears eat people.
SPEAKER_01: But they don't wear clothes.
SPEAKER_01: They don't have, there's not a fashion line from the bears.
SPEAKER_01: Only we, we're the only ones who are creative.
SPEAKER_01: We are creative beings, the highest of all creation, the crown of the cosmos.
SPEAKER_01: Study that.
SPEAKER_01: And then thirdly, God's divine art gallery.
SPEAKER_01: Get out into creation and experience worship through being in God's beauty.
SPEAKER_01: Three books I'd recommend that you read.
SPEAKER_01: I talked about this the last time, but I decided to bring a copy.
SPEAKER_01: I'm going to lay them on the stage if anybody wants to take a picture of him.
SPEAKER_01: The first is Madame Jean Guyan, great mystic of the 16th century, who wrote Experiencing the Depths of Jesus Christ.
SPEAKER_01: And I just consider this one of the great Christian writings of all time.
SPEAKER_01: One thing by Sam Storms, pastor and friend of mine in Oklahoma City, developing a passion for the beauty of God.
SPEAKER_01: And you can see that one's like an easy read.
SPEAKER_01: Now, for all the scholars in the room and you guys who want to dig deep, this is the one I just finished to my chagrin.
SPEAKER_01: Just absolutely the best book of the year for me, The Evidential Power of Beauty, Science and Theology Meet by Thomas Dubay.
SPEAKER_01: If any of you are in the sciences or mathematics, you absolutely must read that.
SPEAKER_01: If you're in college and you're hearing the paddlum that comes from most of the professors in a secular college, you need this book because this gives you what really is happening.
SPEAKER_01: What's really happening among teachers and professors across the world who are realizing the beauty of God and his creation.
SPEAKER_01: Fantastic book.
SPEAKER_00: You've been listening to The Road with Pastor Teacher Steve Holt.
SPEAKER_00: We hope you have been blessed by today's message.
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SPEAKER_00: Thanks again for tuning in today.
SPEAKER_00: Be sure to listen to the next edition of The Road with Pastor Teacher Steve Holt.